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Patil, Indrajeet

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Indrajeet

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Patil, Indrajeet

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.2e7f3e49-9dc2-40b2-b8e3-75a5485dc944

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    The Behavioral and Neural Basis of Empathic Blame
    (Center for Open Science, 2017-12-11) Patil, Indrajeet; Calo, Marta; Fornasier, Federico; Cushman, Fiery; Silani, Giorgia
    Mature moral judgments rely both on a perpetrator’s intent to cause harm, and also on the actual harm caused–even when unintended. Much prior research asks how intent information is represented neurally, but little asks how even unintended harms influence judgment. We interrogate the psychological and neural basis of this process, focusing especially on the role of empathy for the victim of a harmful act. Using fMRI, we found that the ‘empathy for pain’ network was involved in encoding harmful outcomes and integrating harmfulness information for different types of moral judgments, and individual differences in the extent to which this network was active during encoding and integration of harmfulness information determined severity of moral judgments. Additionally, activity in the network was down-regulated for acceptability, but not blame, judgments for accidental harm condition, suggesting that these two types of moral evaluations are neurobiologically dissociable. These results support a model of “empathic blame”, whereby the perceived suffering of a victim colors moral judgment of an accidental harmdoer.
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    Neuroanatomical correlates of forgiving unintentional harms
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Patil, Indrajeet; Calò, Marta; Fornasier, Federico; Young, Liane; Silani, Giorgia
    Mature moral judgments rely on the consideration of a perpetrator’s mental state as well as harmfulness of the outcomes produced. Prior work has focused primarily on the functional correlates of how intent information is neurally represented for moral judgments, but few studies have investigated whether individual differences in neuroanatomy can also explain variation in moral judgments. In the current study, we conducted voxel-based morphometry analyses to address this question. We found that local grey matter volume in the left anterior superior temporal sulcus, a region in the functionally defined theory of mind or mentalizing network, was associated with the degree to which participants relied on information about innocent intentions to forgive accidental harms. Our findings provide further support for the key role of mentalizing in the forgiveness of accidental harms and contribute preliminary evidence for the neuroanatomical basis of individual differences in moral judgments.